


Aura

by Hale13



Series: Whump Bingo 2020 [20]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Human Disaster Peter Parker, Hurt Peter Parker, Irondad, Ned Leeds is a Good Bro, Peter Parker Whump, Peter Parker is a Mess, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Whump, Whump Bingo, Whumptober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:20:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27117385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hale13/pseuds/Hale13
Summary: Peter was used to headaches.  When he was young, he got them after severe asthma or anxiety attacks or after multiple nights of missed sleep from nightmares.  Once he started drinking caffeine, he got them if he tried to cut it out of his diet.  He got his first migraine from the spider bite and he thought his head may actually explode.(For Bingo space G5 – Needing to pause and close their eyes because they’re light-headed, exhausted or have a bad headache.)
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: Whump Bingo 2020 [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1943986
Comments: 13
Kudos: 131





	Aura

**Author's Note:**

> Based on my own experiences with chronic migraines and featuring my personal auras.
> 
> For the guest commenter Sahara bohemier - I planned to write a migraine fic anyway but they requested it too :)

Peter was used to headaches. When he was young, he got them after severe asthma or anxiety attacks or after multiple nights of missed sleep from nightmares. Once he started drinking caffeine, he got them if he tried to cut it out of his diet. He got his first migraine from the spider bite and he thought his head may actually explode.

Now he tended to get regular headaches from lack of sleep or from not eating enough for his metabolism. The migraines came from sensory overload.

The first month or so after the bite it was a banner week if Peter didn’t get overloaded at least once a day. He couldn’t really control his powers well and it was hard not to get distracted by random noises and interesting conversations that were happening around him or by how well he could see now – he could make out individual dost motes in clear detail. How had he lived before this? But the downside was that, when he did go into full-blown sensory overload, when he couldn’t get away from stimuli before it got too bad, it was the worst pain he had ever felt.

So yeah, Peter was used to headaches. What he wasn’t used to was feeling like his brain was leaking out of his ears.

He may have also downplayed things to Mr. Stark when he said it was like his senses were dialed to eleven because, the first time a he came to the work shop on the cusp of a migraine, fresh from a sensory overload, Mr. Stark had mildly panicked before nearly shoving Peter into his bedroom (soundproofed than God) and lowering the lights down to nothing. 

It was the fastest recovery Peter had to date.

After that, Tony had sat down with him to identify possible overload and migraine triggers and had explained to Peter about auras. Apparently, Mr. Stark had suffered from chronic migraines since he was a child, something he had gotten from him mom and had learned how to handle years ago. 

“For example,” Tony had said quietly in the dimmed room, sitting against the bed frame and allowing Peter to lean against him, “my main triggers are lack of sleep and trying to cut out caffeine. I used to get them from red wine too but I cut it out of my diet once I realized.” Peter hummed, the vibration tickling his throat and making pressure build in his ear so he stopped. “Do you know what your triggers might be?”

“Not sleeping or eating enough,” Peter said carefully; his head didn’t feel like it was going to explode anymore but it was still a little tender. “It makes it harder to concentrate and not get overloaded.”

“We can work with that,” Tony told him, careful and calloused fingers digging gently into the pressure point behind his ear and making Peter go boneless with relief. “Do you have an aura?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a warning,” Tony explained. “Like for me, if I lose my peripheral vision or feel like my ear drum has burst I know one is coming. Anything like that for you?”

“I feel really foggy and unfocused and I can’t read,” Peter said. “And I can’t see well out of my right eye.”

“Okay,” Tony said, moving his hands to massage Peter’s neck and Peter groaned and turned his head into Tony’s t-shirt. “That’s good for now Pete, we can work on how to avoid some of your triggers and what to do if you get one later but for now just sleep it off okay?”

Since that day, Peter had managed to avoid most of his headaches from becoming a full blown migraine and had managed to avoid most of his sensory overloads. Well, until today anyway.

Peter knew that he had been spreading himself a little too thin lately: it was finals season so he was studying all the time (even on patrol since Karen could scan his flash cards and quiz him) but he had refused to cut out any of his patrols or his work shop time with Tony. The billionaire had warned him a few days before that he was going to work himself up to an overload but Peter hadn’t been able to slow down. He had to ace his finals and take down the Manfredi mob or, at least, crack the data he had stolen and leave an anonymous tip with the NYPD.

So he probably shouldn’t have been surprised when he woke up the Friday of finals week and felt like someone had taken his brain out of his head, microwaved it, and put it back in. Peter groaned when his alarm clock went off and punched it off his bedside table where it crashed to the floor and kept going off much to Peter’s consternation. He stared at the ceiling and considered just lying in his bed all day; he didn’t have a true final, he just had to turn in his final research paper (twenty-one pages on green energy and how the strides made by the Stark Industries Arc Reactor technology could slow global warming and make energy cheaper en masse not including the bibliography) and then he was done for the say. He just had to last until noon and he could crawl back into bed and never leave.

With one last forlorn sigh into his pillows, Peter pulled himself out of bed and had to pause as the room tilted around him and he got a little light-headed, a spike of pain shooting through his head. He had to swallow convulsively against the wave of nausea that boiled low in his stomach. “You got this,” he muttered to himself, pulling on his Midtown sweatshirt over his pajama t-shirt and shoving on his converse. He had worn joggers to bed and it was honestly just too much trouble to change into jeans.

After triple checking that his report was in his bag and drinking a bottle of water, Peter put on his darkest pair on sunglasses and made his way to the subway, beyond thankful that it was overcast outside.

The subway ride grated on his sensitive ears and Peter struggled not to grind his teeth, the vision in his right eye was already a little blurry and the sounds around him all sounded louder than they should be. He knew he was well on his way to an overload but he just hoped that he could make it to his quiet biology classroom before it got too much worse.

As it was the last day of exams, the mass of students at Midtown were more subdued than normal, many stumbling through the halls flipping rapidly through index cards or looking like extras from the Walking Dead, clearly only still up and moving due to their coffees or energy drinks clutched in white knuckled fingers. Peter sympathized. Ned fell into step with him a few seconds later, slightly pale and flicking through his own research paper to proof it one more time. 

“I know she said it had to be at least fifteen pages but mine is almost nineteen do you think that’s too long? Do you think she will think I’m just trying to get a better grade by writing more? What if she thinks I did that trick where I make my periods bigger?” Ned fretted, causing Peter’s head to spike with pain again.

“Mine’s twenty-one and MJ’s was twenty-three at last count,” Peter said cutting Ned off and adjusting his sunglasses to sit further up his nose. The light was leaking around them too much and he wanted to take advantage of the dim lights as long as possible; once classes started he would have to take them off.

“You look like shit,” Ned said bluntly, sparing Peter a quick glance before going back to shifting furiously through his paper.

“Thanks Ned,” Peter muttered, hunching deeper into his hoodie.

MJ was already sitting sprawled out at her desk when Peter and Ned stumbled into the room, her own paper resting under her sketch book and he bag tipped over on the floor next to her seat. “Sup losers,” she greeted, giving Peter’s sunglasses a cursory glance and flipping to a new page to, presumably, add him to her ‘In Crisis’ series. She would probably present him with a copy of the finished drawing in a few days.

Peter just grunted in response and fell gracelessly into his own seat, digging his paper out of his bag and setting it on his desk before dropping his head down on it. Ned and MJ, who could both take a hint, allowed him to ignore them both until the bell rang, causing Peter to flinch and, sadly, remove his sun glasses.

Mr. Dell swept into the room a moment later and called for their papers to be passed to the front of the room before releasing them to study for any other finals they might have. Peter, having no more finals to take, rested his head back on his desk and dozed off and on until Ned finally nudged him a minute before the bell rang so that he could cover his ears.

The light was stabbing his eyes even through the dark glasses Peter had slipped back on the second he could and the black spots taking up the visual field on his right side were starting to pulse – a sure sign that his migraine was imminent and that he needed to find somewhere to hunker down before it incapacitated him completely. The sky had gotten darker when he followed the trickle of student that were done with there exams outside and he surveyed the line of cars to find Happy’s, moving as quickly as possible to the black Audi.

“Hey kid,” Happy greeted from the front seat, tucking his phone away as Peter collapsed into the back, forgoing his seatbelt to just curl up on the bench. “Are you sick?” Happy asked skeptically.

“Headache,” Peter grunted, the pain getting worse now that he was relaxing. He closed his eyes, careful not to squeeze them shut since he knew it would only make things worse. Happy, bless him, had worked for Mr. Stark so long he clearly knew a migraine when he saw one and darkened the windows in the back before rolling up the divider with a, near silent, ‘take a nap kid’ and taking care to avoid the potholes that dotted the lane in front of Midtown.

Peter drifted, his headache not really getting any better or worse as the car made its way out of Manhattan and onto the freeway that would take them to the compound upstate. In fact, Peter wasn’t even aware of them approaching it until his door unlatched and Mr. Stark put his head into the car, giving a wince when he saw Peter.

“Migraine huh Webs?” He asked sympathetically, levering Peter up and replacing the glasses on his face with a pair of StarkGlasses that made nearly everything around him pitch black. Peter nearly moaned in relief. “Let’s get you upstairs yeah?”

Peter let Tony do most of the work getting him out of the car, he felt touchy, like his head might disconnect from his body violently if he moved wrong and then leaned heavily on his mentor from the garage all the way up to his room. 

Tony, kindly, helped control Peter’s flop face down onto his bed and removed his shoes and glasses before carefully sitting next to him and allowing Peter to dig his face into his thigh. Tony gave a little huff of laughter but understood Peter’s non-verbal cues and started to knead his warm fingers into the base of Peter’s skull. Peter relaxed into the scalp massage, some of the pressure alleviating and he signed in relief. He soon fell asleep to the soft tapping of ran on his windows and his mentors fingers running through his hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Migraines suck friends. I get them maybe once or twice a month and its really no fun. Sleeping is pretty much the only way I can get rid of them.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has interacted with this series via comment, kudo, bookmark or subscription. I never expected such a positive reaction and I can’t begin to tell you all how touched I am.
> 
> Five more prompts to go!! Get in those prompt request if you have them! I have some doozies coming!
> 
> I don’t have a tumblr but join me over on Twitter @Hale1310 - I just set it up and I’m looking for some prompts to combine with these bingo prompts and for separate stories!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
